Capture Of Guru Relieves Japanese

May 17, 1995|The Washington Post and Information from the Los Angeles Times was used to supplement this report.

TOKYO - — An almost palpable sense of relief swept over Japan on Tuesday with the arrest of the nation's most-wanted criminal.

But there was also a lingering fear that this spring's series of terrorist crimes might not be completely over.

Business ceased and traffic stopped on Tuesday morning while the nation watched on live television as police apprehended Shoko Asahara, the secretive guru accused of being the mastermind behind the poison gas attack on the Tokyo subways and several other recent crimes.

By charging Asahara and 40 of his followers with murder, police signaled that they thought they had solved the mystery of the subway attack, which killed 12 and injured about 5,000 others.

In Japan, the vast majority of arrests result in convictions.

But 14 of the murder suspects, all members of Aum Shinri Kyo, or Supreme Truth sect, remained at large on Tuesday night.

Police warned that they might be dangerous.

As if to punctuate the warning, a letter bomb exploded at Tokyo's city hall on Tuesday afternoon, seriously injuring an aide to Tokyo's governor.

The bomb had been addressed to the governor, who has said the sect's certification as a religious body should be terminated.

Police said they were convinced the sect had no more lethal sarin gas of the kind used in the subway attack. Police seized the sect's chemical production facilities nearly two months ago. Any sarin produced before then would have lost its potency by now, police said.

Police have charged that members of the sect, under Asahara's direction, manufactured sarin and released it on Tokyo subway cars during the morning rush hour of March 20.

Poison gas may not have been the only thing the sect brewed in its laboratories, police said.

Officials reportedly plan to pursue charges against the sect for using its Mount Fuji compound as a methamphetamine production center and selling the stimulant to Japan's largest organized crime group.

In raids over two months, police had seized equipment and chemicals, such as hydrochloric acid, that can be used to make the stimulant.

They also found traces of the drug in soil samples around the sect's Mount Fuji complex and in the hair of some followers.

Asahara reportedly had administered stimulants to at least 700 followers in initiation rituals.

Other members were thought to have used drugs to heighten meditative experiences, sometimes through drug-laced cookies, or had been forcibly injected with them.

Some here speculated that the nasty world of narcotics and gangsters provided the murky backdrop for the fatal stabbing last month of Hideo Murai, the sect's chemical chief, and the disappearance of a lawyer and his family in 1989.

Press reports here said the sect is also the chief suspect in a 1994 poison gas incident, in the shooting of the national police chief who was investigating the sect, and in several kidnappings and other crimes.